The Santa Letters: Johnny

I've been fortunate enough to receive some correspondence from Santa this year, letters that he's written to some of the many children around the world who wrote to him. I'll post some of the more thoughtful pieces to spread the warmth and happiness of Santa throughout this holiday season.
- Chet


Dear Johnny,

Thanks for your recent letter in which you so thoughtfully just listed everything you wanted without asking anything about me. I’m sure you meant to, but just didn’t get to it, right? Right.

Things here at the North Pole are, well, they’re cold and miserable. Not like it’s any surprise to anyone; we knew what we were getting into when we moved here. But I never get used to it. It’s just so damn cold this time of year. It’s colder than a freezer on the Mars rover. For all they’re talking about global warming, you think it’d make it nicer up here, but not as far as I can tell. Maybe the glaciers are melting, but I’m not.

I guess we just lied to ourselves when we settled here. For one thing, we went house shopping in the summertime, which is always a mistake. Everything looks better on a summer’s day. What you really want to do is see a place at it’s worst. If you could tour a house during a blizzard in mid-winter, or during a hurricane evacuation, then you’d really know the downsides. But no, we saw something that looked almost nice, and convinced ourselves that it’d be fine. And now we’re stuck, so far underwater on the mortgage that we couldn't dig ourselves out with all the snow shovels I make every year.

And at first we loved the isolation. If there was one thing I couldn’t stand it was all the people around in our old neighborhood. Always stopping by, putting in a good word for themselves, trying to see what List they were on, asking what they were going to get for Christmas. Bah! We had to move up here just to keep from strangling the next neighbor that just happened to drop by unannounced.

But after a few decades, the silence really gets to you. You start to have conversations with icicles. And you don’t want to know what happens with the reindeer on a cold night. Good thing they can’t talk.

Still, it’s better than some places. At least the crime rate’s low here. Anyone stupid enough to be skulking about outside at night dies of exposure before the morning anyway. There’s always a couple each year. Keeps the price of feeding the herd down.

Ho ho ho,
Santa